Guide · Heritage Brontë
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The Pennines are the backbone of England. They run from the Peak District in Derbyshire north to the Scottish border, a broad upland ridge of carboniferous limestone, millstone grit and peat moorland that divides northern England into west and east. The Lake District is on the west side. Yorkshire is on the east. Between them — between Windermere and Haworth — the Pennines.
Most visitors to both areas treat the Pennines as the bit you cross to get from one to the other. This guide argues that they deserve better attention than that.
The Pennines are built from a different rock than the Lake District. The Lake District's dramatic landscape — the craggy peaks, the deep valleys, the volcanic rock that produces the characteristic grey-green of the fells — is the result of very old, very hard igneous and metamorphic rock, pushed up and shaped by glaciation.
The Pennines are younger and softer. The underlying rock is carboniferous limestone — the grey, blocky limestone that gives the Yorkshire Dales their characteristic pale colour and the famous limestone pavements of Malham and Ingleborough their extraordinary appearance. Above the limestone, in the higher areas, millstone grit — a coarse, dark sandstone — caps the ridges and gives the West Yorkshire moorland its dark, sombre character. This is the gritstone that built Haworth's main street and the parsonage, and that gives the Brontë landscape its specific colour and texture.
Between the M6 motorway and Haworth lies the South Pennines — a landscape of moorland, deep wooded valleys and former textile towns. This is the landscape that the Brontë family knew. The Worth Valley, in which Haworth stands, is a South Pennine valley carved by the River Worth through the millstone grit of the West Yorkshire upland.
The South Pennines are less well known than either the Yorkshire Dales to the north or the Peak District to the south, and they receive fewer visitors than either. This is partly because they lack the dramatic scenery of the Dales — no limestone peaks, no waterfalls of the Aysgarth variety — and partly because the former textile industry left a legacy of mill towns and villages that takes a certain kind of eye to appreciate.
The Brontës had that kind of eye. The industrial landscape of the Worth Valley — the mills, the smoke (in their time), the workers walking to work in the early morning — is as present in their novels as the moors above.
The drive from Windermere to Haworth crosses the Pennines via the M6 corridor through the Lune Valley and then either the Aire Gap (the natural pass through the Pennines at low altitude, used by the railway between Skipton and Lancaster) or the higher roads over the moor.
On our Brontë Country Day Trip, your expert storyteller explains the landscape transition as you cross — the change from the volcanic rock of the Lakes to the limestone of the transition zone, and then the millstone grit of the South Pennines. The view west from the Pennine ridge, back towards the Lake District fells on a clear day, is one of the finest long views in northern England.
The Pennines support a different ecology from the Lake District. The limestone of the Dales produces a calcareous grassland that is distinct from the acidic upland of the Lakes — richer in wildflower species, supporting different bird and butterfly communities. The South Pennine moorland above Haworth is blanket peat bog, which is the typical acid moorland of the high Pennines and the habitat for the curlew, golden plover and short-eared owl that Emily Brontë describes in her poems.
The transition from the Lake District upland to the South Pennine moorland — visible on the drive east — is one of the most significant ecological transitions in northern England.
The Pennine crossing is part of the Brontë Country Day Trip. Your expert storyteller will explain the landscape you are passing through.
Planning a Brontë Country day? These go well together:
Carboniferous limestone in the lower areas and millstone grit capping the higher ridges, younger and softer than the Lake District's volcanic rock.
The dark sandstone used to build Haworth's main street and the Brontë parsonage.
From the Peak District in Derbyshire north to the Scottish border, dividing northern England into west (Lake District) and east (Yorkshire).